It’s midday in a dingy studio in Shoreditch, and Alexa Chung is fastening my zip. “It’s very flattering on,” she says, stepping back to survey her work. A dark indigo denim corset top now sits snugly over my cream sweater. “Very good,” she smiles, those blue-green eyes flashing. “I’ll try on the leather dungaree dress for you – it sits just under the boob. The tit shelf.” In her excitement, she yanks the dress on over today’s outfit: a trench coat, Acne denim jacket, Balenciaga jeans and patent cowboy boots. “Imagine I don’t have a coat on.” She twirls, still somehow looking gamine. Then she grows serious, angles her head slightly. “That corset was a last-minute add-on,” she nods. “I saw it coming.”

Alexa Chung Launches Label Of Her Own

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Alexa Chung has seen a lot of things coming: dungarees, loafers, denim cut-offs, pyjamas-as-daywear, prim blouses… You’ll be familiar with her other one-woman revivals: the Barbour Bedale jacket she wore to Glastonbury (half of London promptly smelled of wax); the Mulberry bag named after her that attracted a 9,000-strong waiting list. Before the Gigis and the Kendalls and the influencers of Instagram, what Chung wore dictated what most teens and twentysomethings did several months down the line (not that she’s a slouch in the Instagram department, with 2.6 million followers). It’s no wonder brands such as Madewell, Superga, AG Jeans and, most recently, Marks & Spencer have been so keen to collaborate with her on collections. The logical next step? You can see where this is going. This month, she launches her own line, Alexachung.

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Which brings us back to the denim corset. “I decided we needed a corset at the last minute. Everyone said, ‘Well, it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the collection,’ and I was like, ‘I know, but it’s all I want to wear – so that’s what we need.’” Chung’s last-minute additions often prove astute – a patent mac she sneaked in to her M&S collection was the bestselling piece. Edwin Bodson, managing director of Alexachung, formerly commercial director at Haider Ackermann, says: “She has the best instinct I’ve ever encountered.” If Alexa is feeling corsets – having seen them proliferate on the catwalk first at Prada for autumn/winter 2016, then at Isabel Marant and Tibi for spring – most young women will be come May. “I think learning to trust my instincts is something that I have grown more confident with,” she says carefully, lowering her nicotine-hardened, Home Counties alto.

Alexa Chung Collection Launch: In Pictures

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After seven years Stateside, Chung, 33, is back in London. Looking as startlingly pretty but a touch more jittery than I had expected, she rifles through the rails of her much-anticipated collection, which she will deliver four times a year. As her recently assembled team of 15 taps away on iMacs around her, she pulls out her favourite pieces. “I love this guy, with the Brian Jones stripe,” she says, as she fondles a pink and maroon striped suit. “She’s cute – can’t wait to wear her” is the verdict on a Parma-violet patent minidress. As befits an It-girl, there are plenty of party options: a jacquard cheongsam minidress in baby blue with a funny little “severed hand” pattern drawn by Chung’s friend Charles Jeffrey, and a dusky-pink satin-backed-crêpe dress with a jumbo pearl fastening at the neck. But there are also daywear solutions for those who want in on Chung’s brand of just-off-kilter, page-boy-meets-girl chic: a stack of well-cut denim, cute fuzzy mohair striped knitwear, a neat little Sixties-style suede jacket and a smart trench coat. All are recognisably Alexa, but rendered accessible enough to make you think you could also pull them off. So, too, the shoes: loafers, chunky platforms, satin espadrilles.

Style File - Alexa Chung

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She’s had to avoid the obvious – including her once signature Peter Pan collars. “Someone wrote an article listing ‘Things we predict Alexa will make’, and I read it and was like, ‘Fuck! Cancel!’” she cackles. “I’m always drawn to tradition, so I wanted the brand to be traditional… But also weird. Unexpected.” Prices range from £75 for a T-shirt to £1,350 for a suede jacket, a price point Chung calls (affecting a convincingly nasal PR-speak voice) “advanced contemporary positioning”, and one that places it in the same bracket as Kenzo, See by Chloé and McQ. She says she would wear “nearly all” of it, bar a couple of pieces. When I pull out a navy jumper, the item she says she repeat-buys almost obsessively, she actually apologises. “I know, sorry. Looks boring, but it’s desperately needed.” This one comes with a hot-pink stripe.

Six Things You Only Know About Alexa Chung's Collection Launch If You Were There

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Our trying-on session over, we wander to Rochelle Canteen, one of Alexa’s favourite cafés, a few minutes’ walk from her Shoreditch studio. She seems calmer away from the clothes. We order lunch – monk’s beard and anchovy vinaigrette with a poached egg (“Ooh, and dauphinoise potatoes”) – and I suggest that on the Vogue shoot the previous weekend, she might have felt a little anxious that Lucinda Chambers, the magazine’s fashion director, was styling her designs with those of Dolce & Gabbana, Preen and Erdem. “I was a bit nervous they were going to slag off the clothes,” she admits. “I almost did a disclaimer every time I came out wearing something: ‘This is mine!’” Chung has no formal design training. She took a gap year after school to decide whether to study English at King’s or art at Chelsea, and her modelling career took off instead. Following a successful spell presenting Channel 4’s music show Popworld, MTV came calling and shipped her to the States for It’s On with Alexa Chung, but the show was cancelled after two seasons. The last series she did was for British Vogue’s video channel (she is one of the magazine’s contributing editors). “I think presenting is something that I’ll always enjoy,” she says, sounding wistful. “There’s nothing I like more than shoving the earpiece in and being given a count. But this is a moment in my life where I felt I could dedicate all my attention in one direction,” she says, returning to the topic at hand. “Age had something to do with it, a restlessness in New York, looking for stability. I’m young enough and excited enough to start something new, but old enough to have learnt a bit. And confident enough to think I could pull it off.” She has put her own money into the venture, as well as receiving investment from Peter Dubens, the entrepreneur who made a fortune buying and selling internet provider Pipex, and who also backs Bella Freud’s line.

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“Alexa has been patient for 10 years,” says Edwin Bodson, a mild-mannered Belgian with a booming laugh. Chung lured him from Antwerp to be her numbers guy. “She asked me to make a very honest, clean supply chain and to have a quality level she can be proud of.” Seventy per cent of the collection is made in Portugal, with leather and denim in Italy, and some of the mills are British. Jackets are made in the same factory as those produced for Dolce & Gabbana and Lanvin. A few of the blouses and trousers are made in China, but Bodson stresses that the factories have all been audited. The first set of sales bodes well: they are 40 per cent above target, he says.

“She’s always been a really hard worker,” says her friend Gillian Orr, a journalist at Refinery29 who has known Chung for over a decade. “I find it hilarious that anyone says, ‘What does she do all day?’ She’s always worked so hard. And I think she seems to know what’s cool before it’s become cool.” Harley Viera-Newton, a New York friend who also recently set up her own fashion line of dresses, HVN, agrees. “I warned her that, based on my recent experience, launching your own fashion line is completely all-consuming. I have no doubt she can handle it though – she’s easily one of the hardest-working people I know, she has great taste, and most importantly wears clothes like a second skin.”

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“She’s very bright,” says Lucinda Chambers, who also worked with Alexa on one of her three other Vogue covers. “She has a generosity of spirit that means people open up. She’s not girl-gangy – she’s inclusive. Friendly. I saw her in action at the Vogue Festival and she can kind of do everything: good at writing, interviewing, dressing. She’s very consistent, whether you see her at a party or on-set.” Viera-Newton adds: “One of her greatest qualities is that she doesn’t take herself too seriously and is often the first one to tease herself. She is also fantastic at karaoke and does a very important rendition of Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre’.”

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Chung is an endearing mix of confidence and vulnerability. She seems nervous about the reaction to her collection. “That thing of imposter syndrome comes up a bit I think for everyone, whatever they are working on,” she says at one point, when discussing how she was “tearing her hair out” just before Christmas, having sleepless nights over buttons. Neither is she entirely sure of her move back to London. She lives in an old vicarage in Dalston, and is enjoying redecorating, but misses her life in New York (though she’s keeping her apartment there, perhaps to allow her to be closer to her rumoured boyfriend, the actor Alexander Skarsgård). “God, I love New York! And it’s so ann-oy-ing,” she says, drawing out the individual syllables, “because when I moved there I hated it. I spent years homesick for England and now I’m homesick for New York.”

How does she sum up her enduring appeal? “Oh. I don’t know,” she says, looking awkward. “Least of all because my friends and family constantly take the piss out of me so I never really get clarity on how I’m perceived outside of that.” She takes a sip of her flat white. “I hope it’s authenticity – I hope that’s something that’s in the brand as well. I do have quite a good bullshit detector and I find it really hard to do anything that feels unnatural.”

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Unnatural. The brand isn’t – but the office-job part? Let’s just say she’s getting to grips with water-cooler etiquette. “The other day I found out everyone has their own mugs,” she says, looking thrilled. “I know that makes me sound massively out of touch. I’ve only just got an intern and she looks really busy, but at the beginning I was like, ‘Is there not a runner who can go and get me some fags?!’ That sounds so awful. Sorry.” You sense her team didn’t get offended. “Oh no,” she laughs. “I’m really bad at keeping things profesh. We’ll all just go out and get drunk together.” And in five years’ time, where does she see the brand? “I’d love to open a shop,” she concedes, that awkwardness creeping back. But then she grins. “This is just the start.”